Date: Sat, 24 Apr 1999 01:26:22 -0500 (CDT) From: Kevin Day <toasty@home.dragondata.com> To: ken@plutotech.com (Kenneth D. Merry) Cc: rsowders@usgs.gov, freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: SGI 320 Message-ID: <199904240626.BAA29570@home.dragondata.com> In-Reply-To: <199904240617.AAA40194@panzer.plutotech.com> from "Kenneth D. Merry" at "Apr 24, 1999 0:17:19 am"
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> [ You may want to configure your mailer/text editor so your lines are no > longer than 80 characters. ] > > Robert Sowders wrote... > > Has anyone looked into getting Freebsd to work on the SGI 320 or 540. This a SGI pc, the bus speeds are impressive. The box was built to run NT and that is all that SGI is looking at right now. I saw a demo of this system by SGI the other day and it is a screamer. All bus speeds are 6 times faster than Intel bus speeds. An efficient OS and this box would make for one impressive server, and cheap too. It almost makes NT look ok. > > > > > > I talked to an SGI engineer about their visual workstations a couple of > weeks ago. One thing that he told me that isn't explicitly stated in their > spec sheets/web pages is that the machine has a unified memory > architecture, like the O2, I suppose. That means that the system memory is > shared with the graphics subsystem. > > This would present some challenges for getting the graphics subsystem on > those boxes working correctly with XFree86. My guess is that it would > require some VM support from FreeBSD, or at the very least a way to > configure the kernel to reserve a certain chunk of RAM for the graphics > subsystem. > > Ken If this is the same way it works in the MediaGX or the STPC, this is all hidden from you. If you pop 32M of ram in a MediaGX, the graphics subsystem takes what it needs, and you just see that much less ram. (29.5M base ram shows up, on some systems) The graphic frame buffer then appears on the PCI bus, and you treat it like any other video system. (There's even an unofficial XFree binary for the MediaGX) Kevin Day To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hardware" in the body of the message
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